History

Edwin Wiley Grove made his fortune in the 1880s and 1890s by marketing Grove’s Tasteless Chill Tonic, a quinine-based antimalarial remedy that became one of the best-selling patent medicines in the United States. Grove had come to Asheville for his health — the mountain air of the southern Appalachians was prescribed for respiratory complaints — and he stayed to become the city’s single most consequential developer. His Grove Park Inn (1913), built of native granite on the north slope of Sunset Mountain, established Asheville as a resort destination for the affluent American East.

By 1926 Grove had conceived a far more ambitious project: a covered arcade on the scale of the great European commercial passages — Brussels’s Galeries Royales Saint-Hubert, London’s Burlington Arcade — but executed in the American idiom. The building he commissioned from architect Charles N. Parker was to occupy a full city block in the commercial core, with its ground floor devoted to retail, its upper floors to offices and apartments, and its barrel-vaulted central passage open to the public as a covered street. Grove died in 1927 before the building was complete; it opened in 1929, two months before the stock market crash, and traded under varying owners through the Depression decade.

In 1942, the federal government requisitioned the building for wartime administrative use, an occupation that extended through the Cold War decades as offices of the Federal Civil Defense Administration. The public lost access to what had been a civic amenity for sixty years. Community advocates in the 1990s organized to return the building to its original commercial purpose, securing National Historic Landmark status in 1995 and completing a major restoration in 2002. Today the Grove Arcade is again what Grove intended — a covered market of Asheville makers, artisans, and restaurateurs, in a building that remains among the most remarkable architectural achievements of the American mountain South.